Jobs report to show whether hiring stayed resilient in September
A jobs report on Friday will provide a key gauge of economic health as the United States weathers a surge of inflation set off by the Iran war seven months ago.
The fresh data is set to arrive weeks after the Federal Reserve imposed its first interest rate hike in three years. The move aims to dial back price increases, but it risks an eventual slowdown in hiring as borrowing costs weigh on businesses.
The economy has shown signs of strain in recent months, including a bond selloff that threatens to raise consumer borrowing costs and a resurgence in oil and gasoline prices.
Consumer sentiment dropped last month close to the lowest level ever recorded in the 74-year history of the University of Michigan’s survey.
Despite these headwinds, the labor market has proven sturdy so far this year — and such growth is expected to have continued in September.
Economists expect U.S. employers to have added 84,000 jobs in September, which would mark solid performance but a slowdown from 162,000 jobs added in August.
The U.S. added an average of about 80,000 jobs per month over the first eight months of this year, financial services firm Raymond James found in an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That pace exceeded Raymond James’ expectations of 70,000 jobs added each month over that period.
The Iran war drove up gasoline prices and catapulted inflation to a three-year high. Inflation eased over the summer, but continued fighting has kept prices increases well above pre-war levels.
The annual inflation rate stands at 3.4% as of August, the most recent month on record, putting inflation more than a percentage point above the Fed’s target rate of 2%.
The combination of elevated inflation and a resilient labor market prompted the Fed to raise interest rates a quarter of a percentage point last month.
Investors peg the chances of another rate increase in October at one in three, meaning borrowing costs could rise further within weeks, according to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool, a measure of market sentiment.
“The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., last month.
An increase to the benchmark interest rate raises borrowing costs for consumers and businesses, which in theory should slash inflation by slowing the economy and eating away at demand.
The policy risks a downshift in hiring and an uptick in the unemployment rate, though such fallout typically takes hold after a lag time lasting several months.
By some measures, the economy remains robust.
Gross domestic product grew over three months ending in June, defying fear of a downturn triggered by the Iran war. Consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, rose 0.6% in August from July, the largest monthly increase since March 2025, government data on Wednesday showed.
In this June 27, 2016 file photo Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and president and founder of Greenspan Associates, speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images, FILE)
(NEW YORK) — Alan Greenspan, the longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve, has died, his wife confirmed. He was 100 years old.
“Alan passed away at our home this morning at the age of 100 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease,” Andrea Mitchell, his wife and a chief correspondent at NBC News, said in a statement published by the network on Monday.
The economist is remembered for leading the American central bank amid periods of historic U.S. economic expansion, while critics have also said his policies contributed to and exacerbated the mortgage crisis and financial crash of 2008.
Greenspan, a libertarian Republican, became the 13th chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System two months before the stock market crash on Oct. 19,1987, known as Black Monday. He was credited with moving quickly to alleviate investors’ fears after the crash and was instrumental in ensuring the Federal Reserve made plenty of money available to alleviate the impact on financial markets. Stocks quickly rebounded.
He was appointed Fed chair by four different presidents during his career, first by Ronald Reagan in 1987. Greenspan continued to serve as Fed chairman under presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He steered the U.S. economy through the economic boom in the 1990s, the dotcom bubble, and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His final term as chair ended on Jan. 31, 2006.
Under his leadership, the Fed fostered a distaste for regulation and promoted very low interest rates in the early 2000s — two phenomena critics say encouraged a bubble in housing prices that eventually burst with disastrous effects on the global economy.
During his tenure, and before the financial crisis began, the nation experienced one of the longest periods of economic growth in its history.
A decorated economist, first inspired by music
Greenspan was born on March 6, 1926, in New York City, the only child of Herbert Greenspan, a stockbroker, and Rose Goldsmith Greenspan, a retail worker. His parents divorced when he was 4 years old, and he was raised mainly by his mother and his grandparents.
An aspiring musician, Greenspan attended Juilliard for a year and played saxophone and clarinet before dropping out and enrolling at New York University. He went on to gain his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from New York University. He also engaged in some advanced graduate work at Columbia University in New York, where he studied under the influential economist Arthur Burns.
Though short-lived, his music career was an influential portion of Greenspan’s life, and he considered the move into economics a logical progression. He saw the organization of economic data into sound fiscal modeling as analogous to the organization of musical notes into tunes, according to Greenspan biographer Justin Martin in his book, “Greenspan: The Man Behind Money.”
“I get the same kind of joy from solving a hard mathematical problem as I do from hearing a Haydn quartet,” Greenspan once told The New York Times Magazine.
Greenspan taught economics at NYU between 1953 and 1955 and then founded the economic consulting firm Townsend & Greenspan, where he served as chairman and president from 1954 to 1974. He returned to the firm in 1977 and stayed until 1987.
President Richard Nixon nominated Greenspan to chair the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1974, the first of many government economic positions he would hold. Nixon resigned as president hours after Greenspan was nominated, but he continued to serve under President Gerald Ford. Greenspan also served as a member of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board and was a consultant to the Congressional Budget Office.
In the private sector, Greenspan served as corporate director for many companies, including Alcoa, General Foods and J.P. Morgan & Co. He also served as a member of Time magazine’s Board of Economists and a senior adviser to the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity.
In 2002, Greenspan received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his contribution to global economic stability. In 2005, President George W. Bush presented Greenspan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
He held the position of Fed chairman from the time Reagan appointed him in 1987 until 2006, serving an unprecedented five terms under four presidents before being succeeded by Ben Bernanke.
Greenspan is credited by many with facilitating the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. One day after the Black Monday stock crash, Greenspan affirmed the Fed’s “readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system” and the central bank moved to encourage banks to lend on their normal terms. Unlike prior financial crises, the events of Black Monday notably were not followed by an economic recession or a banking crisis and less than two years later, the U.S. stock market surpassed its pre-crash highs.
During his tenure, Greenspan developed a reputation for being a consensus-builder and for his strong anti-inflation stance, focusing more on controlling prices than on promoting full employment. He led the Federal Reserve through several events with major economic consequences, including two U.S. recessions, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
‘How could we have possibly got it so wrong?’
Starting in June 2003, the Federal Reserve set the federal funds rate, the rate at which banks typically borrow from each other, to one percent for a year. Though its intention was to lower the cost of borrowing and stimulate the economy, critics said the rate was too low and encouraged investments in risky subprime mortgage-backed securities, which they say contributed to the financial crisis in 2008.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, a research organization seen as an authority on measuring economic performance, later said that the recession officially began in December 2007.
In September 2007, Greenspan published a book that was both a memoir and economic commentary, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” in which he criticized the George W. Bush administration for overspending and admitted that he supported the administration’s tax cuts without stressing the need for spending cuts.
In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in August 2012, Greenspan said, “one day before Lehman Brothers crashes, conventional wisdom was not even certain that we would fall into a recession.”
“In fact, we learned many months later that the downward trend had actually started,” Greenspan said. “How could we have possibly got it so wrong? I mean, I actually was saying, ‘Yes, recession is coming, not that we’re here yet.’ We didn’t know that it had already hit.”
In October 2008, Greenspan acknowledged to a congressional committee discussing financial regulation that, “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”
After Greenspan finished his term as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006, he established Greenspan Associates, an economic consulting firm in Washington, D.C.
With Greenspan as president, the firm had four employees as of October 2012. His client list has included giant finance clients like German firm Deutsche Bank and hedge fund Paulson & Co.
Personal life
Greenspan married artist Joan Mitchell in 1952. The couple divorced in 1953 after less than a year of marriage, and the marriage was later annulled. The two remained friends.
His first wife is remembered for introducing him to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, with whom Greenspan shared a friendship, a belief in free-market economic ideals and a philosophy of objectivism. In his 30s and early 40s, Greenspan spent many hours sitting with Rand’s band of followers, known as the “Collective,” discussing topics including politics philosophy, current events and economics.
In addition to Burns at Columbia, Rand and her group were instrumental in helping hone Greenspan’s capitalist, free-market economic philosophy, according to Martin, Greenspan’s biographer.
The group’s open style of debate and discussion served Greenspan well in his various governmental roles. During his career in public service, he became known for a well-developed ability to communicate with Congress without offending those with opposing viewpoints or politicizing his messages.
Though he was said to back revamping the Social Security system and raising the retirement age, Greenspan was wary of how his public statements as Fed chairman might move markets. He rarely granted interviews. He was known for making openly ambiguous public statements about the state of the U.S. economy, once telling Congress, “If I’ve made myself too clear, you must have misunderstood me.”
Greenspan married NBC News correspondent Mitchell in 1997. Their marriage was officiated by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“We’ve had the most wonderful marriage,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek in August 2012. “It gets better every year. We’re still very much together in love.”
Stock photo of tax documents and calculator. (Tfilm/STOCK PHOTO/Getty Images)
Credit card debt held by Americans stands near an all-time high, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, just as a rise in the Fed’s benchmark interest rate threatens to drive up borrowing costs.
The spending crunch may push some debt holders to tap their 401(k) accounts as a means of paying down what they owe and resetting their finances. But experts who spoke to ABC News cautioned against the move, saying any immediate benefits are typically outweighed by taxes, penalties and years of lost investment returns.
Though some budget-busting emergencies could warrant reaching into a 401(k), they said, the advantages and drawbacks differ, depending on circumstances and execution.
“It’s definitely a tempting option, particularly when credit card debt feels overwhelming and you’ve got this balance of cash sitting in another spot. But the costs of taking out retirement funds to pay down debt are very high,” Timi Joy Jorgensen, a professor and director of financial education and wellbeing at the American College of Financial Services, told ABC News.
Total U.S. credit card debt registered at $1.26 trillion in the second quarter of this year, marking an increase of $21 billion from the previous three-month period, a recent New York Federal Reserve study found, also noting it’s the second-highest debt load on record.
Credit card interest rates, meanwhile, have jumped significantly in recent years. In the second quarter of 2026, the average interest rate on all credit card accounts with a commercial bank stood at 20.94%, up from 15.13% at the same time in 2022, Federal Reserve data shows.
Many borrowers who find themselves squeezed between surging prices and heightened borrowing costs may turn to their 401(k) accounts to escape a cycle of high monthly payments and mounting interest. The prospect of short-term relief, however, could carry life-altering financial damage over the long term, some experts said.
People who withdraw directly from their 401(k) accounts usually incur a 10% early distribution tax if they are under age 59½, in addition to a standard income tax paid on the funds. Depending on an individual’s tax bracket, those payments can result in a combined 401(k) deduction of about 30% or more, Jorgensen said.
“If you want to pay down $20,000 in credit card debt, you need to take out almost $30,000 from your 401(k). It’s pretty expensive as a repayment plan,” Jorgensen added.
To be sure, borrowers can sometimes earn an exemption from the early distribution tax. Some 401(k) plans offer qualified hardship withdrawal, allowing individuals to access their funds under particularly dire financial circumstances. The Internal Revenue Service also allows exemptions from the early distribution tax under certain conditions, including disability, home purchase and terminal illness.
Yet even after taxes, the largest downside of early withdrawal from a 401(k) may still remain. The immediate amount paid to access the funds could pale in comparison to the lost income suffered as a result of years of lost investment returns on the withdrawn funds.
A $20,000 withdrawal, for example, may eliminate the opportunity to earn three or four times as much over the ensuing years. If invested at an annual rate of 7% return, $20,000 would grow to more than $75,000 in two decades, according to Jorgensen.
“You’re taking an asset that’s growing in order to pay down an asset that’s already in the past,” Jorgensen said.
Instead of a direct withdrawal of the funds, 401(k) account holders could take a different approach: a loan.
Under this strategy, a person borrows a set amount from his or her 401(k) account and slowly replenishes the account over time through payments deducted automatically from pay stubs. This option allows a person to avoid the taxes associated with a direct 401(k) withdrawal while accessing funds at an interest rate lower than he or she may otherwise find in a consumer loan, some experts said.
“There are times when the loan makes sense if you’re able to pay it back and your cash flow is keeping up,” Kiersten Saunders, a personal finance author and co-author of “Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away.”
The main downside of a 401(k) loan is the risk a borrower may lose his or her job before the loan is repaid. Under those circumstances, the full loan amount is typically due by the next tax deadline.
If a person is in truly dire financial straits, he or she may benefit from turning to bankruptcy rather than a 401(k) withdrawal, some experts said. Since federal law shields 401(k) accounts from bankruptcy, the retirement funds may sustain hope for one’s financial future, even if present-day difficulties appear insurmountable, they added.
“The first thing I would do is put that retirement funding and savings out of my mind, because the courts will treat it that way,” Jorgensen said. “If the court isn’t going to touch it, then I wouldn’t touch it.”
(NEW YORK) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic says it blocked several possible attempts to use its AI technology for research that could potentially support the development of biological weapons, according to a new report from the company.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, said it disrupted dozens of instances of potentially malicious use of its AI models since December 2025, including several examples of what the company described as “biological misuse.”
The report details five case studies involving the use of Anthropic’s models in ways the company said “could support biological weapons development.”
In one instance, Anthropic said a researcher outside the United States accessed Claude from a region where the AI assistant is not supported and used the model while researching highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu. According to the company, the research focused in part on the virus’ adaptation to mammals.
Anthropic said the research was “clearly dual use in nature,” noting that understanding how the virus adapts could help scientists identify naturally emerging variants with pandemic potential but could also produce information that could potentially be used to make a virus more dangerous.
Anthropic said it banned accounts associated with the cases but stressed that it could not determine whether the researchers intended to cause harm.
“We do not assert that they intended harm,” the company said in the report.
This is not the first time Anthropic has released a report detailing potential misuse of AI. The company has issued three prior threat assessments detailing malicious uses of AI.
The latest report was released days after former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon spoke publicly about his concerns over increasingly powerful AI systems.
“If you extrapolate into the future, the level of capabilities of these AIs,” Coxon told CNN. “They could cause extreme havoc, for example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons.”
Coxon’s comments come as a growing number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill are calling for increased government oversight and new safety regulations for AI development.
